The Communication Brief

Every message is finished by the person who reads it

hello@alexagathangelidis.com (Alex Agathangelidis) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We like to believe that a message is complete when it leaves our desk, polished and approved and sent, but at that moment it is only half written. The other half is written by the reader, in a context we do not control and with associations we never chose, and it is that second half, not ours, that decides what the message ends up meaning. I call the distance between the two halves the reading gap, and this newsletter will spend its time inside it, one real case at a time.

The first case is an old one, and I have chosen it for exactly that reason. Time has removed the noise around it, and what remains is the mechanism.

The word was accurate, and that was the problem

In April 2017 a passenger on United Airlines flight 3411, from Chicago to Louisville, refused to give up his seat so that crew members could fly, and airport security officers dragged him off the plane. Other passengers filmed it, and within hours the footage was everywhere. United’s chief executive, Oscar Munoz, responded with a statement in which he apologised “for having to re-accommodate these customers.”

A month earlier, on 17 March, PRWeek had named Munoz its Communicator of the Year.

We should be fair to the word before we judge it. Inside an airline, “re-accommodate” is not an evasion. It is a precise operational term for moving a passenger from one flight to another, the kind of word that legal teams approve because it describes a procedure without admitting anything beyond it. Read from inside the building, the sentence was careful, measured and correct.

But nobody outside the building read it that way. The audience had already seen the video before they saw the statement, and so they read the word against the image of a man being pulled down an aisle. In that light a technical term turned into a euphemism laid over force, and the sentence acquired a meaning its author never wrote: that the company was protecting its procedure rather than the person. What the organisation said was a description of a process. What the audience read was an alibi.

How does an award-winning communicator choose that word?

This is the question worth sitting with, because the easy answer (that Munoz or his team were careless) explains nothing. The people who drafted that statement were experienced professionals, and their mistake was not a lack of skill. It came from where they were standing.

The longer we work inside an organisation, the more its vocabulary starts to sound neutral to us. Words that our colleagues use every day stop carrying any colour, and we lose the ability to hear them the way a stranger would. We cannot simply decide to forget what we know, and so we write sentences that are perfectly clear to everyone who shares our context and strangely cold to everyone who does not. The more senior and the more fluent we become, the wider this gap tends to grow, which is why it catches the best communicators more often than the worst.

The story did not end with the first statement, and what followed confirms the pattern. An internal email from Munoz to employees, which soon leaked, described the passenger as “disruptive and belligerent” and defended the staff. Read inside the company, it was a leader standing by his people. Read outside, it was a chief executive blaming the man in the video. Only days later, and after a third statement, did United issue the kind of unreserved apology that the public had been waiting for from the start. By then the apology was no longer being read as an apology. It was being read as a retreat.

Warmer words are not the answer

The natural conclusion is that the fix lies in better writing, softer language and a more human tone. There is something to this, and a warmer first statement would certainly have done less damage. But warmth written from inside the organisation has its own reading gap, because an audience that already distrusts us reads sudden warmth as performance. Better words chosen from the wrong starting point still land in the wrong place.

The real fix is a change of order rather than a change of style. Most statements are written outwards, from what the organisation wants to say towards the audience. Messages that survive are written in the opposite direction, starting from what the audience has already seen and believes and working back towards what the organisation can honestly say into that space. United’s audience had seen the video, and any statement that did not begin from that image was going to be read against it.

In practice this means asking two questions before any important message goes out. What has my audience already seen or heard about this before my words reach them? And which of my words means something different to them than it means to me? Neither question requires talent. Both require the discipline to step outside the building before we start to write.

The half we do not write

Every organisation, sooner or later, sends a sentence like “re-accommodate” into the world, a sentence that is correct, approved and fatally incomplete. The question is not whether our audience will finish our messages for us, because they always will. The question is whether we have already read them through their eyes before we press send.

Munoz’s statement contained only a few words, and the public needed less than a day to finish writing it.

Brand messaging starts on the reader’s side of the page

hello@alexagathangelidis.com (Alex Agathangelidis) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most messages that fail were well written. The problem shows up later, when someone outside the organisation reads them.

Inside a company, a message arrives with context. People know why it was written and what each word is meant to signal. The reader outside gets only the words. They fill in the rest with what they already think about you.

I call the distance between those two readings the reading gap. In my experience it is the most common reason a sound strategy produces a weak result. It is also the one that is least often measured.

Teams usually test a message on each other. That feels like testing, but colleagues share the same assumptions, so the message always works in the room. The first person outside the room is the one who decides what it means.

So we work in the opposite order. Before we write anything, we look at how the audience already talks about the organisation. Search data shows the words people use. Comments and press coverage show the angle they take. Together they give us a picture of the reader before we try to reach them.

Only then do we write. A message that starts from the reader’s existing view can move them a step. A message that ignores it usually confirms what they already believed, which is often the opposite of what was intended.

The last step is simple and often skipped. We show the draft to people who had nothing to do with it and ask what it means to them. If their answer differs from ours, we change the words.

A good message survives being retold. When your audience can explain it to someone else in their own words, the gap is closed. When only your team can explain it, the work is not finished yet.

A brand is what your audience reads into it

hello@alexagathangelidis.com (Alex Agathangelidis) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A brand is what people think when they hear your name. Most of that thinking happens without you.

Organisations tend to treat the brand as something they make: a logo and a set of values on a slide. Those are tools. The brand itself forms in the audience, from what people experience and from how you compare with the alternatives they know.

This explains why so many rebrands change so little. They redesign what the company controls and leave the audience’s picture where it was. Six months later, the new logo sits on the same reputation.

When we start brand work, we spend the first weeks on the audience rather than on the identity. Two questions do most of the work. How do people describe the organisation when it is not in the room? And what do they need from an organisation like this that nobody is giving them?

The first answer shows the brand as it is. The second shows where it could go. The distance between them is the strategy.

Identity matters once that is clear. A look and a tone of voice help people recognise a brand quickly and trust it over time. They work only when they point to something the audience already finds true, or wants to be true.

Brand and reputation are often used as if they meant the same thing. They do not. The brand is the promise people expect from you. The reputation is their record of whether you kept it. A strong brand with a weak record loses trust faster than a modest brand that keeps its word, because people remember a broken promise longer than a kept one.

That is why we plan the two together, and why the logo usually comes last.

The channel is part of the message

hello@alexagathangelidis.com (Alex Agathangelidis) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most communication plans choose the channel at the end, as a question of reach. I think it belongs near the beginning, because the channel changes what the message means.

Radio taught me this early. A listener hears the same sentence differently depending on what played before it. The words stay the same. The setting decides how they land.

The same holds online. A statement from a chief executive reads as official on the company website and as personal in a short video. A serious announcement placed in a feed built for entertainment risks being read as entertainment, or not read at all.

Channels also differ in how much they ask of the audience. A polished film gives people a finished picture. A short post in a founder’s own voice leaves room for a reply. Neither is better. Each produces a different kind of attention, and the choice should follow what you need the audience to do next.

So we plan from the message outwards. First we decide what the audience must understand. Then we choose the places where they can understand it in the right frame. Often that means fewer channels, each used with more care.

One question helps before anything goes out. Imagine a stranger meeting this message in this exact place, between the posts around it. What will they think it means? If the answer is not what you intended, change the channel before you change the words.

Reach still matters. It tells you how many people saw the message, but the channel decides what they saw.

Every company is now a media company

hello@alexagathangelidis.com (Alex Agathangelidis) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every organisation now publishes every day, whether it plans to or not. The website, the social accounts, the job ads, the chief executive’s posts and the replies to customers all reach an audience. Very little of it is treated as media. All of it is read as media.

For most of the last century, people met companies through journalists and advertising. Both had gatekeepers. Today people meet organisations directly, in their own channels, and form their view there.

This has a side effect that many leaders underestimate. The line between internal and public has become thin. An internal memo shared online or a customer’s screenshot can turn a private conversation into a public statement within hours. The audience then reads it without the context it was written in.

Media organisations handle this with something most companies lack: an editorial line, and a person who protects it. Without them, a company has channels and a calendar to fill, but no clear sense of what it stands for in public or what it should leave unsaid.

We usually start by writing that line together. One paragraph on what the organisation talks about and for whom, and one sentence on what it does not publish. Then we agree who decides when something does not fit.

It sounds modest. In practice it changes how every channel is used, because each post now has to earn its place in a publication instead of filling a slot in a schedule.

Trust is the reason this matters. A story about a company travels fast, and a correction rarely travels as far. Organisations whose audience already trusts their channels can answer for themselves. The rest depend on others to tell their story.

Every company is now a media company. The useful question is whether it behaves like one.